Creative Loitering: A Non-fiction Workshop

Charles D'Ambrosio said that, “Writing an essay is a form of loitering—a lingering, a skulking, a meandering.” In this workshop, we'll invoke a singular event, image, memory, or person to begin writing a piece of creative nonfiction with no intentions of where, why, or how we might end it. Poet and essayist Christian Wiman once said that a poem is a failure if it ends how the poet intended it to end. We'll begin writing our personal essays, or histories, with this same mindset and with the hope to change.

Win Bassett’s essays and interviews have appeared in The Atlantic, the Paris Review Daily, Oxford American, The Poetry Foundation, Salon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Men’s Journal, Guernica, Pacific Standard, Commonweal, Buzzfeed, Nieman Storyboard, The Toast, The Rumpus, storySouth, Killing the Buddha, Electric Literature, Sojourners, and elsewhere. Win serves as Social Media Editor for the Virginia Quarterly Review. He is a former assistant district attorney and serves on the PEN Prison Writing Program Fiction Committee. He volunteers as Legal Advisor for Asymptote and The Field Office, a literary agency based in Lexington, Kentucky.